The present invention relates generally to the use of a computer within a mark-up language environment and, more particularly, to a method for displaying objects by a computer device in a mark-up language environment and enabling a double-click operation within the mark-up language environment.
Typical PC-based applications use the double-click operation for interface operation, whereas the mark-up language environment is focused on single click operations. Because users are accustomed to utilizing double-click operations, confusion may occur when a user attempts to perform an operation while inside of a mark-up based environment. To address this problem, Internet Explorer, a common markup-language environment, implements a double-click lock out period so that if a user performs a double-click operation, the application views it as a single click. However, when providing web-based applications to users where the interface is modeled after the look and feel of PC-based applications, users would expect their double-click actions to perform identical to their PC-based counterparts, and so a workaround is needed to support double-click behavior correctly.
Any interface environment, whether PC or mark-up language based, provides an Event Model which is the mechanism responsible for delivering Events to the Listeners that are interested in those events. These environments have specific events related to mouse interaction, and during rapid mouse-clicking occurrences, the following set of events will occur:
onMouseDown
onMouseUp
onClick
onMouseDown
onMouseUp
onDblClick (DoubleClick)
Following generally accepted interface guidelines, the visual representation of an object will change during the MouseDown and MouseUp phases of this process, and the Click and DoubleClick events will perform actions specifically related to the object.
Internet Explorer implements the double-click lock out feature by disabling the second MouseDown event which poses a problem when trying to convey the correct visual representation to the user (or any other functionality that the programmer might wish to add to this event). For instance, for a scroll button or a spin box, which would typically allow a user to rapidly select the object by using multiple clicks, the double-click lock out basically reduces the ability for the user to rapidly select the object. In essence, every other selection by the user will be discarded. Thus, there is a need in the art for a method to allow a user to have the benefit of rapid selections of an object in a mark-up language environment without eliminating the benefit of the double-click lockout operation for other aspects of the mark-up language environment.